Yahoo picks up We7 ad sales account

Yahoo Advertising has won the display ad account for We7 in a deal which will see it build more creative sponsorship opportunities than for advertisers than it offers other sites on its network.

We7
We7

The deal with the online music service will more closely follow its current ad sales deal with Bebo, in which Yahoo Advertising builds bespoke sponsorship opportunities for advertisers, based around the content on the sites.

Yahoo will be serving ads on We7 through its display network, while also handling display sponsorship and partnership opportunities on the music site.

It will handle all online display advertising for We7, as the music site aims to increase the scale of its online advertising.

The ad-funded music streaming service previously split its ad sales between an in-house team and Woot! Media but has appointed Yahoo in order to scale up its advertising output and monetise its growing userbase.

Phil Macauley, business development and commercial relations director at Yahoo, said, “We will be selling advertising for We7 as a standalone site, both for deeply integrated sponsorship deals as well as serving standard display network advertising.”

We7 said the site had increased users by 400% year on year and now hosts over 5m songs, so it needs scale up its advertising in order to monetise its growing audience effectively.

Steve Purdham, CEO of We7, said, “A big issue in ad-funded music has been whether it actually has the capability of working and a big part of that is the ad sales and selling. We have built our audience to provide a great opportunity for brands to reach audiences but now we have to ensure that we can provide the scalability so that the artists can get paid for their music.”

We7 adopted a premium service in January, which allows users to access the service ad-free for £9.99 a month, the same price as it’s rival ad-funded music service Spotify. (nma.co.uk, 27 January 2010).

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk